The purpose of eugenics was to improve the “quality” of the white race through selective breeding. The SAT was initially created to reinforce that racist concept.
Eugenicist Carl Brigham believed Black people were intellectually and culturally inferior. So when he was creating the SAT in the 1920s, he designed it in a way that appealed to the educational and cultural experiences of white, middle, and upper-class students. Essentially, he set up Black test takers to fail.
The College Board initially signed off on this. It wasn’t until 1993 that the Board changed the name of the SAT from the Scholastic Aptitude Test to the Standard Admissions Test, in an effort to separate the exam from its racist history.
It’s already been proven that tests like the SAT can’t truly measure intelligence, yet many colleges and universities today still utilize SAT scores for admission. The score gap between Black and white test takers today is even wider now than it was 30 years ago.
This history provides more context behind the systemic issues that exist within higher education. But the fact remains, no single exam can accurately measure the intelligence we hold.